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This ambitious study explores how important darkness--artificial darkness--was, as an actual technology, in producing not just photographs but visual novelties and experiments in cinema in the nineteenth century. The study plays out against a backdrop of urban history, where most scholars have focused on the growth of artificial light and the electrification of cities. Elcott’s study challenges that approach. In considering zones of darkness, it ranges from the sites of production (darkrooms, studios) to those of reception (theaters/cinemas/arcades) that shaped modern media and perceptions. He argues that, in the nineteenth century, the avant-garde was often less interested in the filmed i...
Darkness has a history and a uniquely modern form. Distinct from night, shadows, and artificial light, “artificial darkness” has been overlooked—until now. In fact, controlled darkness was essential to the rise of photography and cinema, science and spectacle, and a century of advanced art and film. Artificial Darkness is the first book to historicize and theorize this phenomenon and map its applications across a range of media and art forms. In exploring how artificial darkness shaped modern art, film, and media, Noam M. Elcott addresses seminal and obscure works alongside their sites of production—such as photography darkrooms, film studios, and laboratories—and their sites of re...
Cyanotypes documents six distinct series of cyanotypes produced by visual artist, performer and composer Marclay in collaboration with Graphicstudio.Known as the inventor of 'turntablism', Marclay has explored the relationship between visual and sonic phenomena through his work in diverse media.In the cyanotypes, he reclaims the obsolete technology of the audio cassette as a tool for visual abstraction. First developed in the 1840s, the cyanotype is a camera-less photographic process performed by placing objects directly onto a photosensitive surface, resulting in a silhouetted image.Commonly known as 'blueprints', cyanotypes were famously used by nineteenth century botanist Anna Atkins and ...
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A fascinating survey of pioneering work in experimental cinema and art from 1905 to the present day, revealing the high stakes and transformative potential of these forms This generously illustrated publication surveys the work of filmmakers and artists who have pushed the material and conceptual boundaries of cinema. Over the past century, the material, optical, abstract, spatial, and tactile properties of film have been tested at a level of experimentation and utopian ambition that is generally unrecognized. Whether creating synesthetic or 3-D environments, projective or non-projective installations, generations of leading-edge artists have explored how technology transforms experience. Th...
German writer, critic, and theorist Paul Scheerbart (1863–1915) died nearly a century ago, but his influence is still being felt today. Considered by some a mad eccentric and by others a visionary political thinker in his own time, he is now experiencing a revival thanks to a new generation of scholars who are rightfully situating him in the modernist pantheon. Glass! Love!! Perpetual Motion!!! is the first collection of Scheerbart’s multifarious writings to be published in English. In addition to a selection of his fantastical short stories, it includes the influential architectural manifesto Glass Architecture and his literary tour-de-force Perpetual Motion: The Story of an Invention. ...
Screen Space Reconfigured is the first edited volume that critically and theoretically examines the many novel renderings of space brought to us by 21st century screens. Exploring key cases such as post-perspectival space, 3D, vertical framing, haptics, and layering, this volume takes stock of emerging forms of screen space and spatialities as they move from the margins to the centre of contemporary media practice. Recent years have seen a marked scholarly interest in spatial dimensions and conceptions of moving image culture, with some theorists claiming that a 'spatial turn' has taken place in media studies and screen practices alike. Yet this is the first book-length study dedicated to on-screen spatiality as such. Spanning mainstream cinema, experimental film, video art, mobile screens, and stadium entertainment, the volume includes contributions from such acclaimed authors as Giuliana Bruno and Tom Gunning as well as a younger generation of scholars.
Against the grain of the growing literature on screens, *Screen Genealogies* argues that the present excess of screens cannot be understood as an expansion and multiplication of the movie screen nor of the video display. Rather, screens continually exceed the optical histories in which they are most commonly inscribed. As contemporary screens become increasingly decomposed into a distributed field of technologically interconnected surfaces and interfaces, we more readily recognize the deeper spatial and environmental interventions that have long been a property of screens. For most of its history, a screen was a filter, a divide, a shelter, or a camouflage. A genealogy stressing transformation and descent rather than origins and roots emphasizes a deeper set of intersecting and competing definitions of the screen, enabling new thinking about what the screen might yet become.
This book examines the concept of darkness through a range of cultures, histories, practices and experiences. It engages with darkness beyond its binary positioning against light to advance a critical understanding of the ways in which darkness can be experienced, practised and conceptualised. Humans have fundamental relationships with light and dark that shape their regular social patterns and rhythms, enabling them to make sense of the world. This book ‘throws light’ on the neglect of these social patterns to emphasize how the diverse values, meanings and influences of darkness have been rarely considered. It also examines the history of our relationship with the dark and highlights ho...